


Things Left Unsaid

by ifitgivesyoujoy



Category: Scott Pilgrim - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-01
Updated: 2012-12-01
Packaged: 2017-11-19 23:13:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/578669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifitgivesyoujoy/pseuds/ifitgivesyoujoy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Stephen Stills has 99 problems in his life, then a bitch is definitely at least two of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things Left Unsaid

**Author's Note:**

> My take on how Stephen and Joseph became a couple while Scott was busy learning to be a real person.

He had that scruffy, starving artist look that some guys in the music scene actively cultivated.  Stephen Stills, however, did not cultivate anything about himself.  If his clothes were wrinkled and plain and faded, it was because he only had enough money to get them cheap at Goodwill and occasionally throw them all together in a washer at the coin laundry.  If he was a little unshaven, it was because he didn't actually care enough to shave every day.  If he had dark circles under his eyes, it was because he was spending all his time worrying about the band (enough for three people, because Scott couldn't focus on anything other than Ramona long enough to worry, and Kim…had her own issues to work out).  If this look made him look kind of accidentally fucked-over, subsequently possibly making some people want to fuck him, well, how was he supposed to know?  

Stephen Stills didn't know the first thing about being wanted.  He knew all about wanting - wanting people to listen to his music, wanting new friends, wanting Julie to shut up and let him be her fucking boyfriend with no complaints - but it had never really been a two-way street.  "It's not fair," Scott had jokingly whined a while back, "all the chicks ogle Stephen Stills and ignore me" - and Kim had rolled her eyes extra hard, and Envy had hit him on the back of the head with a magazine, and Stephen had just squinted at him for a second.  Ogling?  Was there ogling?  Besides in Envy's direction?  With Julie around to rip down his self-esteem every time it started to rebuild itself, it didn't feel like anybody even wanted him around, much less wanted him like that.  

Well.  Neil kind of wanted him around.  But that was more in a begrudgingly friendly, bros before hos way that guys learned to take for granted before they even learned to walk.  

Wanting was not something he was used to applying to most of his relationships.  Naturally, it didn't even occur to him in his relationship with Joseph, at least not at first.  Stephen Stills needed something, anything to save his sinking ship of a band, and Joseph put up with his desperation out of utter apathy.  

Or did he?  

It was Stephen's second or so week of sitting nights in Joseph's spare office chair, helping screw with the sound levels, when he started to question it.  Not out of nowhere - Joseph had made some sort of muttered comment, something like "you're lucky you're pretty" - and for the first time it made him realize what was going on.  Joseph wanted Stephen around.  Maybe it wasn't because he liked his company, or anything normal or human like that, but it was at the very least because now that Todd Ingram was a pile of coins in Scott PIlgrim's pocket, Stephen Stills had become the rockstar crush du jour.  

It wasn't very long after that particular epiphany that he had another fight with Julie.  

"You spend every night in that guy's fucking room," she spat, acid dripping from every word.  "What, are you dating him now?"  

"Maybe I should!" Stephen shouted back.  "Maybe I should just go fuck him, since I won't be getting it from you any time soon!"  

That night, storming slightly drunkenly from Julie's pretentiously upscale apartment, Stephen mulled over his words and decided that they weren't so outrageous after all.  A short walk later, he was ringing the bell at Joseph's place.  

"It's two in the morning, Stills, I'm not working on your CD right now," Joseph said in that infuriatingly quiet voice as soon as he opened the door.  

Stephen sighed heavily, only just realizing that he was out of breath.  He met Joseph's eyes.  "I think I want to fuck you," he said finally.  

Joseph arched one eyebrow.  "You want me to wait here while you decide, or what?"  

Stephen grabbed Joseph by the collar of his t-shirt and kissed him harder than he had ever kissed Julie in their two-or-so years of dating.  

(For all the snarking, for all of his clearly selfish views on life, Joseph was surprisingly fantastic in bed.  He seemed to have this subtle understanding of what Stephen needed, on top of what he himself needed.  He even let Stephen top that first night, which was nice, since he made it clear on subsequent nights that such an arrangement would not be the norm.)  

Joseph was a bitch.  There was no getting around that.  But there were just…little things.  Nothing to make him a legitimately nice guy, but enough to set himself apart from Julie in a pretty big way.   He would insult Sex Bob-Omb's music, but never Stephen's songwriting.  He would scowl at most of the group, and make snide remarks, but when it came to Kim and Neil he would always shake their hands and stay silent.  If you listened to the things Joseph didn't say, you could see the compliments, the subtle approval, lurking beneath his words.  

And for Stephen, it was enough.  Enough that he started spending almost every night at Joseph's place long after they made the CD.  Enough that they started subtly holding hands and kissing occasionally in public.  Enough that Stephen went for weeks on end without even sparing Julie a stray thought.  

A week or so after his final fight with Julie, she accosted him on the street.  "Why haven't you been answering my calls, you utter douchebag?"  

Stephen hooked his thumbs through his belt loops and regarded her with every ounce of Joseph-esque contempt he could muster.  "I fucked Joseph," he said, skipping the build-up.  "More than once, actually."  

She turned bright red, and for the first time since he'd known her she had absolutely nothing to say.  A string of swears hissed out under her breath, scathing and efficient but ultimately meaningless.  

He forced himself to keep a straight face, because part of him wanted to laugh at her and skip away and probably make out with Joseph again.  But he kept his cool to deliver his parting blow: "For the record?  This is a break-up, bitch."  

The next time they saw each other, he and Joseph were ordering coffee from her.  None of them said a word about their situation.  Stephen Stills did not leave a tip.  

Anybody outside of Stephen and Joseph would call their relationship dysfunctional, but Stephen was intimately acquainted with the concept of dysfunctional, and this wasn't it.  They functioned just fine - they understood each other.  They could bitch at scratch at each other all they wanted, but they never tried to change each other.  That was, ultimately, what made it work.  There was no whining or pressuring.  After a while, their friends learned that the appropriate response to their battles was not "stop fighting" so much as "get a room."  

And the bizarrely effortless way they fell together made things move…weirdly quickly.  

They'd been dating for a couple months when one day, Stephen stood in front of Neil and shifted awkwardly on his feet.  He waited a few moments for Neil to look up from his gameboy before finally blurting out, "I think I want to get a place with Joseph."  

"You guys should live here."  Neil didn't look up, and he didn't miss a beat. "Actually, I've got a couple friends looking for an off-campus roommate."  

Stephen blinked.  "Um.  Okay."  

Neil paused his game and stood to pat Stephen on the back.  "You look happy.  I mean, you look less tired, which I think is happy for you?"  

Stephen nodded, still feeling sort of shocked.  "Yeah.  I mean, I think so."  

"And it's because you're with Joseph instead of Julie?"  

He nodded again.  

"Yeah, so whatever, man."  Neil grinned and patted his shoulder one more time before walking off into the kitchen.  

People used to say that someday Stephen would cave and marry Julie and be her bitch forever.  He didn't like thinking about that (he actually wrote one of his best songs while riding the crushing wave of horror he felt when he considered a lifetime of Julie).  And these days, in a parallel that surprised nobody, people started saying the same things about him and Joseph.  But when he sat down and thought about that fate, he didn't get the urge to write an angry, suffocated rock song.  

Actually, what he did do was write a vague but still stupidly sappy love ballad about how he felt.  After he wrote it, he read it over, realized what he had done, and buried it in a drawer where hopefully nobody would ever find it - especially not Joseph.  

Because with Joseph, it was all about the things left unsaid.  


End file.
